The president of the National Education Association delivered an unhinged speech at the teachers union’s annual meeting that focused more on left-wing talking points than helping students.
Becky Pringle, in her keynote address, said that her goal was “to unite not just our members, but the nation to reclaim public education as a common good, as the foundation of our democracy, and then transform it into something it was never designed to be — a racially and socially just and equitable system.”
She also spoke about former President Donald Trump, saying: “We worked hard to rid ourselves of a tyrannical, deceitful, and corrupt White House, but the reality is that the seeds that were sown during that horrible season continue to germinate."
Pringle said that the NEA “will organize for power” and “strategically and continuously harness our collective strength.”
She was mocked online for a segment of her speech that resembled a scene from The Office in which Dwight Schrute was tricked into delivering remarks modeled after speeches by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Pringle started to get louder as she said: “We are the ones who help shape the heart of this nation's hope and dreams. We are the ones who hold steadfast to the belief in the plausibility of the possible. We are the heirs of all who did this work before us. We must keep going. NEA delegates, we can do this work. We must do this work!”
"Our students are depending on us to win all the things," Pringle said, before yelling, “All the things! All the things! All the things!”
The group's far-left rhetoric is not new. Last year, in an event co-hosted by the Labor Department, the State Department, and the United States Agency for International Development, Pringle declared that “education justice must be about racial justice. It must be about social justice. It must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has made similarly controversial remarks on a number of occasions. For example, at a 2021 AFT conference, she appeared with Ibram X. Kendi and said that “critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” She said that Republicans who opposed CRT in schools were “bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching kids honest history.”
More recently, the AFT adopted a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel, while Weingarten wrote an article for USA Today saying that “MAGA Republicans are destroying our public schools.”
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Teachers unions are fundamentally political entities that only serve the interests of union bosses, not teachers and certainly not students. This is abundantly clear in their fervent opposition to school choice and their near absolute support of Democratic candidates. What makes them so dangerous is the amount of influence that they have, as teachers unions are often considered to be among the most powerful in the country.
The bottom line is that teachers unions should not be influencing public policy and should not be viewed as helping anyone besides themselves. They are little more than leftist social clubs with bank accounts attached.
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